'The city of dreams and the city of stern reality' : British literature and the experience of Vienna in the 1930s

Abstract

Between 1932 and 1938 a number of writers from Britain visited Vienna:  Stephen Spender, John Lehmann, Naomi Mitchison and H.D. Events including the beginning of Austro-Fascism and the Austrian Civil War necessitated a deepening awareness for these authors of the political situation in Austria.  Their experience of Vienna was  not only of a city of historical culture but also of a modern city in crisis.  I recreate a contemporary rhetorical context for the literary works and show how 1930s British literature about Vienna both draws on and disrupts this rhetoric.

Stephen Spender visited Vienna with his male lover, Tony Hyndman, and stayed and returned several times for his female lover, Muriel Gardiner.  His long poem Vienna (1934) has as its subjects both the Austrian Civil War of February 1934 and Spender’s personal experience of Vienna.  I show how the poem articulates Spender’s ambivalences about politics and personal relationships and how these ambivalences are connected.  I suggest that Spender’s post-war rejection of the poem, on the grounds of its lack of ‘order’ and ‘clarity’, is politically problematic in its attempt to replace ambivalence with homogeny.

John Lehmann went to Vienna to write, attracted by ‘Red Vienna’s’ political and social experiment and by its young men.  I show how Lehmann’s novel set in Vienna, Evil Was Abroad (1938), attempts to overwrite the ambiguity of some of his poems in The Noise of History (1934) with a unifying narrative.  The  novel suggests that it is possible to fuse political conscience with literary exploration and sexual desire.  I argue that Lehmann’s expressed Socialist conviction is compromised by his literary and personal instrumentalization of Austrian working-class experience and working-class men.

Naomi Mitchison travelled to Vienna immediately after the Civil War to distribute aid to Socialist families.  Unlike other critics I read Mitchison’s Vienna Diary (1934) as not only a documentary of her experience but also as a literary text.  Mitchison reads political events in Vienna in terms of a mythological structure created in her novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931).  In Vienna Diary the figure of Mitchison is not only a ‘comrade’ but has a leading role within this mythological structure.  I show how Mitchison, unlike Spender, embraces the ambivalences of her political position.

H.D. went to Vienna for a course of psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud.  I offer a new, political-historical reading of Tribute to Freud (1956), using contemporary newspaper reports and H.D.’s  letters to Bryher from Vienna, not previously discussed in detail by critics.  I argue that H.D.’s letters put her on the political right, problematizing a reading of Tribute as pacifist.  I also demonstrate that the antagonism in H.D.’s relationship with Freud was not just gendered but racial.  Tribute both expresses and conceals H.D.’s political ambivalences and the awareness of her own violence instigated by 1930s Vienna.

In conclusion I show that there is a tension in these texts between empathy with the victimized Others of 1930s Vienna and a self-fashioning rooted in the Vienna experience.  I challenge simple categorizations of ‘left’ and ‘right’ for literary writers, showing how all texts contain elements which might be characterized as ‘Fascist’ and ‘anti-Fascit’, implying an analogy between external political battles and the internal struggles of ambivalence.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record

ASCII CitationAtomBibTeXData Cite XMLDublin CoreDublin CoreEP3 XMLEndNoteHTML CitationHTML CitationHTML ListJSONMETSMODSMPEG-21 DIDLOpenURL ContextObjectOpenURL ContextObject in SpanRDF+N-TriplesRDF+N3RDF+XMLRIOXX2 XMLReferReference ManagerSimple Metadata